09 May 2012

Postcard (一枚のハガキ, 2010)

Kaneto
Shindō’s film Postcard
(Ichimai no Hagaki,
2010) opened Nippon Connection 2012 last Wednesday night. The 100 year old director, who was mentored
by legendary filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi,
has said that it will be his final film.
Postcard features a strong
female lead – a common feature of Shindō’s films – a resilient peasant woman
named Tomoko Morikawa (Shinbou Ōtake). In order to emphasize Tomoko’s emotional and
physical strength, Shindō shows Tomoko ably carting water to her home using a
shoulder pole. This motif recalls Shindō’s
classic film The Naked Island (Hadaka no shima, 1960) which tells a
similar story of a rural family struggling to survive on a tiny island.

Tomoko does not live on an island but she
is similarly trapped by circumstances of fate. Women
living in rural Japan during World War II may just as well have been living on
islands for their choices were limited.
Tomoko has been living a meagre existence with her husband Sadazo (Naomasa Musaka) and his elderly parents
(Akira Emoto and Mitsuko Baisho). They were poor but happy for 16 years until
Sadazo is called up into military service.
Sadazo is then one of the unlucky chosen by the drawing of lots to be shipped
off to Manila. On the eve of his
departure, Sadazo shares a poignant postcard from his wife with his bunk mate Keita
Matsuyama (Etsushi Toyokawa). Sadazo has been unable to bring himself to
reply to the postcard because he knows that anything he writes that is personal
will be censored by the military. He predicts
that Matsuyama will be more likely to survive the war on home front duty and gives
the postcard to Matsuyama for safekeeping, asking him to take it to Tomoko
after the war and tell her that he received it.

In structuring the film, Shindō has tried
to find a balance between tragedy and comedy. Indeed, tragedy upon tragedy befalls poor Tomoko in the first half of the film
to the point that it almost becomes farcical. Matsuyama himself also returns home to find his life is a tragi-comical disaster. Matsuyama’s arrival on Tomoko's doorstep with the postcard shifts the balance towards comedy and romance with Ren Osugi putting in a terrific
comic performance as a married man who desperately wants Tomoko to become his
mistress.

As a female spectator I had mixed feelings
about the film at first because for the first half it felt like yet another
drama that romanticizes the self-sacrificing wife. Tomoko is willing to not only do hard
labour, but also to marry her brother-in-law in order to fulfil her duties to her
husband’s family. I was
won over in the end by the realistic touches in the film.
Shindō has not cast the film with starlets but with
mature actors who bring a lot of authenticity to their roles. Although the string of tragedies Tomoko has
to endure seems over the top to us today, such tragedies were sadly all
too common in wartime Japan. Shindō does
not romanticize Tomoko’s life, he rather lays it bare. From sex as a chore to preparing
meagre meals with leftover scraps, Tomoko holds her head up high and survives all that life throws at her.

The most touching part of the film is the
knowledge that for his final film, Shindō has chosen to tell his
own story. He too was drafted into the Imperial
Japanese Navy. Of the 100 men he served
with, 60 were indeed chosen by lottery to serve on a ship and died when their
ship was attacked by a submarine. 30 men
were selected to serve on a submarine and were lost, and another four were selected
to act as machine gunners on freight ships and were also killed. Shindō was one of six men selected, like Matsuyama, to clean
the Takarazuka theatre and they were the only ones from the 100 to survive the
war. "I have always had the souls
of the 94 with me and have made them the theme of my existence," said the director when
promoting the film at a press conference (source: Mark Schilling). It is fitting that a director who has dedicated his career to facing injustice full on should end his career with a tribute to the memory of
those men whose sacrifice gave us the gift of his talents as a director and screenwriter.